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Incomplete and Fragmentary Stories
1891 1912
Mrs Bolton was one of those sharp and rancid women whose
..
very aspect gives a cultured man the toothache; it recalls vividly
the taste of sour grapes. There had perhaps been a time when
she was not elderly, but the boldest flight of metaphor would
never have imaged her as young. The slanders of her enemies
drew a frightful picture of the low-class Gorgon: they compared
her chin to a penknife, her lips to a pair of icicles: her smile
was a perpetual reminder of vinegar, her voice was like frost
against the teeth. The sobriety of history merely records that
her face was twin sister to a ferret, her features sharp and if the
word may be used without offence gritty: altogether she was an
excellent type of that class of crude failures whose mould nature
has left unbroken that there may be a scourge for the refined
and a pattern for housewifes.
Her face was Nemesis sculptured in marble
In her distress the child of the hothouse spoke the language of
nature.
“I never forgive, but I bear no malice when I have requited”
She felt as if she were groping for a coin in the dark
A fire of remembrance burned a forgotten sentence into her brain
and wrote it in crimson on her cheeks.
The voiceful hurry of the indicator copied the pattering footfall
of the fugitive hours.
His amazement unwound itself in a coil of laughter.
Just as the clouds that steal the sunshine cannot throttle the
sunlight as well
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A QUIET hilly country on the confines of Bengal after rain. Grey cloud yet banked up the horizon except in the north and sloped over the eastern down-curve in great sheeny ribs brownish and grey like the ribs of a fan. The mango trees by the road with their crowded burden of ruddy or stained-yellow blossom looked moist and quite fresh, the earth discoloured, draggled and limp with the wet, but healed of the dusty thirst and discomfort of many showerless days. The west showed patches of pale bluish steel-grey sky where the veil of cloud was thinnest and the sinking light able to break through; just on the verge one or two of the outlying clouds were ruddy like a dull fire just meaning to go out. The moon must be somewhere eastward, a pale wisp of half-lucid yellow, waiting for the brilliancy to come, but in the east the long dark-ribbed layers ran down with a forbidding thickness. They were the skirts of the retreating storm. The soldier Rajmohan as he reined in his horse on the top of a rise looked behind him once at the western and once at the southern sky and observed with a contraction of the brow the line of the southern horizon growing a heavy black and glaring up with a lowering threat at the half-cleared zenith. “A storm brews there” he muttered to himself “and it may break here or it may pass. Either way there is no moonlight for me tonight.”
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THERE had been a heavy fall throughout the whole of that December day. The roads were white and indistinguishable in a thick pall of moonlight and dazzling snow; here and there a drift betrayed the footing. In the sky a bright moon pursued by clouds ran timidly up the ascent of the firmament; great arms of darkness sometimes closed over it; sometimes it emerged and proceeded with its still luminous race, ran, swayed, floated, glided forward intently, unfalteringly. Patrick Curran, treading cautiously the white uncertain flooring of earth, stumbling into snowdrifts, scouting into temporary darkness for his right road, cursed the weather and his fortunes. “It is not enough,” he complained, “that I should be a proscribed fugitive hiding my head in every uncertain refuge from the pursuit of this devil’s Cromwell, doomed already to the gallows, owing my life every day to the trembling compassion of my poor father’s tenants; it is not enough that I should have lost Alicia and that Luke Walter should have her; but the very moon and the snow and the night are his allies against me. Since God is so hard on me, I wonder why the devil does not come to my help — I would sell my soul to him this moment willingly. But perhaps he too is afraid of Cromwell.” “It is hardly probable,” said a voice at his side suddenly. Patrick Curran turned with a fierce start and clutched at his dagger. He was aware in the darkness of a dim form pacing beside him with a step much quieter and more assured than his own. “Who are you?” he cried, rigid and menacing. “A wayfarer like yourself,” said the other, “I travel earth as a fugitive.” “From whom or what?” asked Patrick. “How shall I say?” said the shadow, “Perhaps from my own
Page – 991 thoughts, perhaps from a too powerful enemy.” After the discovery of the recent conspiracy to murder Cromwell and restore Charles Stuart, the country was full of Royalist fugitives, hiding by day, travelling by night, in the hope of reaching a port whence they could sail for Ostende or Calais. For the inquisitions of the Republican magistrates were imperative and undiscriminating. “I would give,” he said to himself, “my soul and the rest of my allotted days as a free gift to Satan, if I might once clasp Alicia in my arms and take with me into Hell the warm sense of the joy of her body and if I might see Luke Walter dead before me or be sure he was following me. Oh if I can once be sure of that, let the brown dog of the Dacres leap on me the next moment, I care not.” “You may be sure of it,” answered the voice at his side, strangely sweet, yet to Patrick’s ear formidable. He turned, thrilling. “You must be the devil himself,” he almost shouted. “I may be only one who can read your thoughts,” said the other in that sweet sinister voice which made the young man fancy sometimes that a woman spoke to him. “And that I can, you will easily judge when I have told you a very little of what I know of you. You are Patrick, the second son of Sir Gerald Curran who got his estate from his wife, Margaret Dacre, his baronetcy from King James and his death from Cromwell who took him prisoner at Worcester and hanged him. You were to have married Lady Alicia Nevil, when the conspiracy of which you were one of the heads as well as the hand destined to strike down the Puritan tyrant, was discovered by the discernment, luck and ruthless skill of Colonel Luke Walter.” The young Cavalier started and uttered a furious imprecation. “It was he;” said the other, “he has great brain-power and penetration and a resolute genius. It is even possible he may succeed Cromwell, if the God of the Puritans gives him a lease long enough.” “If I have the chance, I will shorten it,” cried Patrick Curran.
Page – 992 “Or I;” said the unknown, “for just now I too am a Royalist. But to proceed. You were proclaimed and doomed to a felon’s death in your absence; the Earl, implicated in the conspiracy, was compelled as the price of his pardon to betroth his daughter to Luke Walter, and the marriage is fixed for tonight.” “Tonight!” groaned the young man, and he smote his thigh miserably with his hand. “At the Church of Worndale.” “But will it matter if Luke Walter perishes before he has consummated his nuptials?” “I promise you that,” said the unknown. “It does not suit you that Alicia should marry another. It does not suit me that there should be a strong successor to Cromwell. Charles Stuart is my good friend, and I wish that he should rule England. Therefore, Patrick, it is a bargain.” “Who the devil are you?” cried the young man again, marvelling. As if to answer the moon peeped out from between two heavy angry masses of black cloud, illumining the earth’s intense and inclement whiteness. He saw beside him a young man of remarkable beauty, whose face was perfectly familiar, but his name could not be remembered. “As for your soul and your life,” said the stranger, and as their eyes met, Patrick shuddered, “you need not give them to the devil whether freely or as part of the bargain, for they are already his.” He laughed a laugh of terrible and ominous sweetness, and in a moment Patrick remembered. He knew that laugh, he knew that face. They were his own. At that moment the moon passed away into the second fragment of cloud. Patrick stood, unable to speak, looking at the dim shadow in front of him. Then it vanished. It was some time before the young man could command himself sufficiently to pursue his way. He tried to think for a moment that it was John Dacre, the illegitimate son of Sir Gerald by his sister-in-law Matilda Dacre, who resembled Patrick strongly and was his sworn comrade and lover. But he knew Page – 993 it was not John. That was not John’s face or John’s speech or John’s thinking. It must have been a vivid dream or a waking illusion. He walked forward in the darkness, greatly disturbed, but with recovered courage. Again the moon shone out, this time with a clear gulf of sky just in front of her. Before Patrick the white road stretched long, straight and visible to a great distance and was marked out here by a high snow-covered hedge from the equally white indistinguishable country around. “Come now, that is better,” said Patrick Curran. As he spoke, he saw far off on the road a dark object travelling towards him; he slackened his pace and was minded to turn off the road to avoid it. But it was approaching with phenomenal speed. As it came nearer, he saw that it was only a dog. Again Patrick stood still. A dog! There was nothing in that. It was not what he had feared. But he remembered that singular conversation and the impious prayer that had arisen in his heart about the brown Dog of the Dacres, — the dog which showed itself always when a Dacre was about to die and leaped on him whenever the doom was by violence. He smiled, but a little uncertainly. Then the moonlight seemed to dwell on the swiftly-travelling animal more intensely and he saw that it was brown. Never had Patrick seen any earthly thing master of such a terrible speed. It ran, it galloped, it bounded, and the wretched man watching the terrific charge of that phantasmal monster, — for it was a gigantic mastiff, — felt his heart stop and his warm youthful blood congeal in his veins. It was now within twenty paces; he felt the huge eyes upon him and knew that it was going to leap. He went down heavily with the ponderous frame of the animal oppressing his breast, its leonine paws on his shoulders, its hot breathing moistening his face. And then there was nothing. That was the most terrible part of it, to have been borne down physically by a semblance, an unearthly hallucination, a thing that was this moment and the next was not. Patrick struggled to his feet, overcome by a panic terror; his nerves cried to him to run, to travel away quickly from this accursed night Page – 994 and this road of ghastly encounters. But he felt as if hamstrung, helpless, clutched by an intangible destruction. He sat down on the snow, panted and waited. After a few minutes the blood began to flow more quietly through his veins, the pounding of his heart slackened and the sick agitation of his nerves yielded to a sudden fiery inrush. He leaped furiously to his feet. “The Dog of the Dacres,” he cried, “the brown Dog, the Devil’s Mastiff! And no doubt it was his master spoke to me in my own semblance. I am doomed, then. But not to the gallows. No, by God, not to the gallows. God’s doom and the devil’s, since I can resist neither, but not man’s, not Cromwell’s!” Then he paused. “Tonight!” he cried again. “At Worndale Church! But I will see her once before I go down to Hell. And it may be I shall take Luke Walter with me. It may be that is what the Devil wants of me.” He looked about the landscape and thought he could distinguish the trees that bordered the distant Church of Worndale. That was in front of him. Also in front, but much more to the left, was Trevesham Hall, the home of Alicia Nevil. He began walking rapidly, no longer with his first cautious and doubtful treading, but with a bold reckless stride. And it was noticeable that he no longer stumbled or floundered into snowdrifts. Patrick knew that he had only a few brief inches of his life’s road left to his treading; for no man of the Dacre blood had ever lived more than twenty-four hours after the Brown Dog leaped on him. A desperate courage had entered into his veins. He would see [incomplete]
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IT WAS in the forests of Asan that the Golden Bird first flew out from a flower-besieged thicket and fluttered before the dazzled eyes of Luilla. It was in the forests of Asan, — the open and impenetrable, the haunt of the dancers and the untrodden of human feet, coiling place of the cobra and the Python, lair of the lion and the jaguar, formidable retreat of the fleeing antelope, yet also the green home of human safety where a man and a maiden could walk in the moonlit night and hear unconcerned the far-off brool of the kings of the wilderness. It was into the friendly and open places that the golden bird fluttered, but it came no less from the coverts of dread and mystery. From the death and the night it flew out into the sunlight where Luilla was happily straying.
Luilla loved to wander on the verges of danger just where
those flower-besieged thickets began and formed for miles together a thorny and tangled rampart full at once of allurement
and of menace. She did not venture in, for she had a great fear
of the thorns and brambles and a high respect for her radiant
beauty, her constant object of worship and the daily delight
of all who dwelt for a while on earth labouring the easy and
kindly soil on the verges of the forests of Asan. But always
she wandered close to the flowery wall and her mind, safe in
its volatile incorporeality, strayed like a many-hued butterfly
far into the forbidden region which the gods had so carefully
secluded. Perhaps secretly she hoped that one day some kingly
and leonine head would thrust itself out through the flowers and
compel her with a gaze of friendly and majestic invitation or else
that the green poisonous head of a serpent, reposing itself on a
flower, would scrutinise her out of narrow eyes and express a
cunning approval of her beauty. It was not out of fear of the lions
and the serpents that Luilla forbore to enter the secret places. She
Page – 996 knew she could overcome the most ferocious intentions of any destroyer in the world, four-footed or footless, if only he would give her three minutes before making up his mind to eat or bite her. But neither lion nor serpent strayed out of their appointed haunts. It was the golden bird that first fluttered out from the thickets to Luilla. Luilla looked at it as it flitted from bough to bough, and her eyes were dazzled and her soul wondered. For the little body of the bird was an inconstant flame of flying and fleeting gold and the wings that opened and fluttered were of living gold and the small shapely head was crested gold and the long graceful quivering tail was feathered trailing gold; all was gold about the bird, except the eyes and they were two jewels of a soft ever-changing colour and sheltered strange looming depths of love and thought in their gentle brilliance. On the bough where it perched, it seemed as if all the soft shaded leaves were suddenly sunlit. For as Luilla accustomed her eyes to the flickering brightness of the golden bird, it hovered at last over a branch, settled and sang. And its voice also was of gold. The bird sang in its own high secret language; but Luilla’s ear understood its thoughts and in Luilla’s soul as it thirsted and listened and trembled with delight, the song shaped itself easily into human speech. This then was what the bird sang — the bird that came out of the death and night, sang to Luilla a song of beauty and of delight.
“Luilla! Luilla! Luilla! green and beautiful are the meadows
where the children run and pluck the flowers, green and beautiful
the pastures where the calm-eyed cattle graze, green and beautiful the cornfields ripening on the village bounds, but greener
are the impenetrable thickets of Asan than her open places of
life and more beautiful than the meadows and the pastures and
the cornfields are the forests of death and night. More ensnaring
to some is the danger of the jaguar than the attractive face of
a child, more welcome the foot-tracks of the lion as it hunts
than the pastures of the cattle, more fair and fruitful the thorn
and the wild-briar than the fields full of ripening grain. And this
I know that no such flowers bloom in the safety and ease of
Page – 997 Asan’s meadows, though they make a thick and divine treading for luxurious feet, as I have seen blooming on the borders of the wild morass, in the heart of the bramble thicket and over the mouth of the serpent’s lair. Shall I not take thee, O Luilla, into those woods? Thou shalt pluck the flowers in the forests of night and death, thou shalt lay thy hands on the lion’s mane.
“O Luilla! O Luilla! O Luilla!
Note on the Texts
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